Rapidly developing technological innovation and mass production have become such hallmarks of our industrialized world that we may fail to consider the events and individuals that laid the groundwork for our many conveniences today. Beginning in Europe in the mid-18th century, the Industrial Revolution continued growing and spreading as innovators around the world began modifying old machinery and methods for production or creating new ones. This lively volume profiles a number of the minds behind some of history’s greatest industrial advances, including Robert Fulton, Margaret Knight, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.

This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.

Martin Worth compiles biographies of several of the engineers responsible for transforming the pastoral landscape of landscape of Britian into today's view.

"This book - based on the successful Radio 4 series - tells the engineers' story, showing how their work and lives interconnected to carry forward a saga that in the space of only two generations turned Britain from a pastoral into an industrial country and opened the way for the rest of the world to do the same."--BOOK JACKET.

DIVThis remarkable book looks at hundreds of autobiographies penned between 1760 and 1900 to offer an intimate firsthand account of how the Industrial Revolution was experienced by the working class. The Industrial Revolution brought not simply misery and poverty. On the contrary, Griffin shows how it raised incomes, improved literacy, and offered exciting opportunities for political action. For many, this was a period of new, and much valued, sexual and cultural freedom./divDIV /divDIVThis rich personal account focuses on the social impact of the Industrial Revolution, rather than its economic and political histories. In the tradition of best-selling books by Liza Picard, Judith Flanders, and Jerry White, Griffin gets under the skin of the period and creates a cast of colorful characters, including factory workers, miners, shoemakers, carpenters, servants, and farm laborers./div

During the nineteenth century, Scranton served as the face of a rising America and a hub of technology and innovation'¿¿between 1840 and 1902, the city of Scranton changed from a lazy backwoods community to a modern industrial society with 100,000 residents. During this time, Scranton'¿¿s citizens desperately tried to adapt their thinking to keep up with the rapid changes around them, and in the process forged the world views that would define the twentieth century.

In Georgian London, Henry Maudslay started an engineering works that was to become world famous, and not just for the engines it made, but also for the engineers who received their training there and went on to bigger and better things. At a time when engineering and machines were in their infancy, the designers and engineers at Maudslay's soon became famous. From Maudslay himself to Joseph Whitworth (who founded Armstrong Whitworth), David Napier (designer and builder of the first Cunard steamships), Richard Roberts (designer of power looms) and James Nasmyth (inventor of the steam hammer), the list of engineers of world repute is amazing. A fascinating study of what was the hotbed of British engineering in the early 1800s. Without these men the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible.